Five Things About Today

1) I got another card from Mom and Dad! M & D, it's the Deception Pass card. Thanks so much! It's going on the bulletin board right now!

2) The rain is coming straight down. It sounds like your neighbor is running her shower. All. Day. Long. Only she isn't. This is nothing new for Seattleites, but it is pretty sloppy out there. Our on-site director, Peter McCullogh, sent out to everyone a great tutorial on local rain descriptions that will look pretty darned familiar to those in the Pacific Northwest. I pasted (with goofy formatting... sorry!) Peter's Rain 101 at the bottom of this page. Washingtonians, you'll note the missing 'drizzling', 'misting', and so on. Those words are missing, naturally, because it's not drizzling and it's not misting. It's SHOW-ER-ING.

2b) I looked around the dining hall at lunch, and everyone is in some form of waterproof clothing, a little bedraggled, but laughing. The line to get tea after lunch was long. Ali and I went out this morning to find tights (we each bought a pair at cheap-o Primark for the equivalent of US $2) so we'll be warm in our dresses for tonight's speaker and High Table.

3) I did laundry this morning. This involves putting US $20 on a laundry card, which you insert into a box on the wall in the laundry room to make the washers and dryers run. The washer is about 1/3 the size of an at-home washer, so I may have finally learned the virtue of "small loads." I told Lena not to do the mental math because two loads today cost US $10. TEN. Then again, a bagel with lox and cream cheese in the Covered Market will cost you US $10, and lots of clean unmentionables is 1) a better value and 2) mentionable.

3b) Laundry is a hot topic at Bread Loaf and the subject of much shared wisdom. Those who tried the washers and dryers in the last week impart scoop to those of us just now scrubbing our stuff. I'm indebted to these laundry pioneers, because my clothes were mostly dry (only my jeans are hanging around the room in weather that's not going to help much in the drying department) after about three hours of tumbling.

4) I'm reading books 3-14 of Wordsworth's "Prelude" and trying to appreciate the rain in a Wordsworthian "nature makes me smarter and more creative!" sort of way. We'll see...

5) Tonight, Oxford Professor of Poetry Christopher Ricks gives a talk here at BL before High Table. Ricks apparently worked at Oxford for years before gaining popularity for writing a book analyzing Bob Dylan's lyrics as poetry and further increasing appreciation for Dylan. Tomorrow, after class #2 on "Moby D.", I board a bus with the Page-to-Stage Class (the class here reading and seeing ten Shakespeare shows) and ride to London to see another version of "Midsummer" at the Globe (see link to production details at bottom). We have time to go to Tate Modern (next door to the Globe; see link to Tate Modern at bottom) beforehand; it's hard to say which (Globe v. Tate) gets me more excited...

Have a great day, everyone!